AlanBarber.Org
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Opera 9.0 (Merlin) Preview 1
Man those boys (and girls) at Opera sure have been busy! Version 8.5 of their browser was released in September and they’re already talking about version 9.
I’m not complaining though. I think it’s great. From the beginning opera was a very nice browser. It’s support for basic features was a bit lacking but in the last 6 months or so they have really cranked it up. 8.5 is very close to being right on par with IE or Mozilla/Firefox.
It’s impressive to see them really pushing hard now to surpass these browsers. Opera has been my browser since well about this time last year when I downloaded version 7.54. It was an extremely small and fast browser and except for problems with a few websites I used it for everything. With version 8.5 I now use opera for all my browsing needs except for one site. This isn’t opera fault though. It’s my stupid bank and their online service. It refuses to run on anything except IE or Netscape (Hey dumbasses Netscape is dead!)
But I digress. Opera 9.0 looks to be an impressive application. Here is just the shortlist of new features:
XSLT 1.0
XPath 1.0
Web Forms 2.0
Web Apps 1.0 CANVAS element
Some CSS3 Selectors
TLS 1.1 and TLS Extensions
Partial SVG Basic 1.1
And that’s just what’s being added to the core engine! Not to mention all the other new features and hopefully *fingers crossed* full ACID2 compliance!
Just a short primer here. ACID2 is a test that the Web Standards Project developed to help browser vendors to verify their browsers to follow, well, web standards. Simply put, ACID2 is a webpage that is designed to use many of the web standards, html, css, etc. If the browser follows the standards then the webpage will look like a smily face! If not then it just looks like garbage.
Surprisingly current browsers fail the test. Most vendors, including opera, are working to correct their problems and properly support the features need for the test to pass.
It’s a good thing trust me. The more vendors work to support standards and in a proper way the easier it will be for web developers to design sites that work for all browsers. As a result it will mean end users like yourself will be able to visit websites and they will look and function correctly for you.
Anyhoo, you can read up on the >full details and while you’re at it check out the blog of Tim Altman. He works at Opera and post a lot about the development of the browser.
on 10/26/2005 at 10:20 AM